When I was younger, I used to love the idea of yoga and inner peace and radiating joy and inspirational quotes. My walls were always filled with quotes – some in beautiful frames and others written hastily on post it notes and tacked haphazardly on the wall.
Truth be told, I still love inspirational quotes, and I was reminded recently by a friend of the importance of surrounding ourselves and our families with words of truth.
It would be easy to blame me becoming disillusioned about all the other zen-like attempts at inner peace on 2020. After all, I think we’ve all had our foundations rocked.
But for me, it started long before that.
It started somewhere in the years when, for me, standard cliched quotes about centering oneself and finding one’s truth started to ring hollow. I followed what the world told me would bring me peace. But it only brought me confusion and anxiety. No amount of mind-emptying deep breathing, centering poses or peaceful candles could bring my heart to the place that it needed to be.
It was around that time that I stopped looking within for peace and I started looking above.
Truth be told, in some ways it’s more difficult to seek peace through God. It’s more difficult because it asks something of us.
The peace of the modern world is a peace that tells us we can find happiness when we follow our bliss and refuse to be constrained by traditional morals or ethics or rules or belief systems. It is a peace that expects nothing of us, and precisely because of that, it also doesn’t deliver much to us.
It’s fleeting.
On the contrary, the peace of the Lord asks us to sacrifice. It asks us to take a stand. It asks us to renounce and affirm and pick up our crosses and march forward. It expects a lot, but it delivers even more.
It’s within this framework really that I have approached some of the trials of 2020. Like many people, I see the darkness and the oppression seeping in all around, and I find myself craving joy, craving peace. I want to shine a light in this darkened world and bring hope where hope is so desperately needed.
My husband and I started a Consecration to Saint Joseph at the beginning of the year, but we lost our way close to the end of it when Covid and shutdowns and e-learning happened. I asked my husband yesterday to pick that up with me again, and we started anew, at day one, yesterday.
But I was still craving more. We have four daughters, and while we could consecrate ourselves and our family to someone greater than ourselves, I wanted my daughters to be able to do the same. I wanted to do it in a way that would be meaningful to them.
Our pastor always says that there is no such thing as a coincidence – he calls them “God-incidences,” and so I have to think that it was providential that in the mail today I received my copy of Marian Consecration for Families with Young Children.
This was what I have been waiting for, and I feel receiving it today was an answer of a prayer from God.
So much has seemed fleeting this year that I have been craving the tangible. I stopped doing my Scriptural Rosary because the verses were online, and then I found a picture book copy of the same thing and resumed. I stopped writing so much because, again, I felt locked behind a screen in a world in which every word is mediated through pixels and programs. It didn’t feel authentic. I stopped reading about good and meaningful worldly topics because all I really wanted was a connection to what was and is and always will be truly greater than I am.
And now I have this book. Something tangible to share with my daughters. Pictures we can all ogle over. Representations of the Holy Family depicted in races and ethnicities from all over the world – something everyone can find a home in. Lessons to help teach my children all about Marian dogma while asking them to search within themselves for answers about what they want to say to her as they search for the words to make those stirrings of their little hearts into prayers.
And of course, as CS Lewis reminds us, “No book is really worth reading at the age of ten that is not equally – and far more often – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.” Meaning… I’m sure my husband and I will glean more from the consecration than even our children will.
I don’t think the ball will drop on 2020 and I will have found the substance that I am truly seeking just as I don’t think the oppression I have been feeling this year will be raised. But I do think all of these trials that we face, the trials that force us to look to someplace higher will forge something new in our hearts. They are the seeds that will grow and flower and create roots in our hearts and in our souls.
They will become our resolve. And our perseverance. And our compassion. And our empathy. And our faith.
We have to believe better days are ahead, and we have to believe that the trials of these days are leading us there.
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By the way, you may have noticed that I have not blogged in quite awhile. I have still been writing, it’s just I do most of my writing on Instagram these days. It’s easier to format, and people automatically see it – that way I don’t have to spend all my time trying to get my words in front of people’s eyeballs.
I would love it if you would join us over there. If you don’t have Instagram, my IG posts go straight through the Facebook. It’s just harder to see them on Facebook because of their algorithms.